A Black Mud From Africa Helps Power the New Economy

By BLAINE HARDEN

Published: August 12, 2001

Before you make another call on that cell phone, take a moment, close your eyes and reflect on all you've done for Mama Doudou, queen of the rain-forest whores.

Thanks to dollars that you and millions like you have spent on cell phones and Sony PlayStations, Mama Doudou had a knockout spring season in a mining camp called Kuwait, deep in central Africa. Kuwait -- a name suggesting big money from below ground -- was one of 20 illegal mines hacked in the past year out of the Okapi Faunal Reserve, a protected area in the Ituri rain forest of eastern Congo. The reserve is named after a reclusive, big-eared relative of the giraffe that is found only in Congo. Along with about 4,000 okapi, the reserve is home to a rich assemblage of monkeys (13 species), an estimated 10,000 forest elephants and about the same number of Mbuti people, often called pygmies, who live by hunting, gathering and trading.

Mama Doudou, though, didn't mess with wildlife or pygmies. She sold overpriced bread in the mining camp and negotiated terms of endearment among 300 miners and 37 prostitutes. For a miner to secure the affections of a prostitute, he had to bring Mama Doudou some of the precious ore he was digging up in the reserve: a gritty, superheavy mud called coltan.

Coltan is abundant and relatively easy to find in eastern Congo. All a miner has to do is chop down great swaths of the forest, gouge S.U.V.-size holes in streambeds with pick and shovel and spend days up to his crotch in muck while sloshing water around in a plastic washtub until coltan settles to the bottom. (Coltan is three times heavier than iron, slightly lighter than gold.) If he is strong and relentless and the digging is good, a miner can produce a kilogram a day. Earlier this year, that was worth $80 -- a remarkable bounty in a region where most people live on 20 cents a day.

Coltan is the muck-caked counterpoint to the brainier-than-thou, environmentally friendly image of the high-tech economy. The wireless world would grind to a halt without it. Coltan, once it is refined in American and European factories, becomes tantalum, a metallic element that is a superb conductor of electricity, highly resistant to heat. Tantalum powder is a vital ingredient in the manufacture of capacitors, the electronic components that control the flow of current inside miniature circuit boards. Capacitors made of tantalum can be found inside almost every laptop, pager, personal digital assistant and cell phone.

Mama Doudou, who is 45, is formally known as Doudou Wangonda, but she is called Mama because in the rain forest she is widely respected. She told me she doesn't understand what ''rich white people'' do with coltan. But she's exceptionally well versed in how much they pay for it. Late last year, exploding demand for tantalum powder created a temporary worldwide shortage, which contributed to Sony's difficulties in getting its new PlayStation 2 into American stores, as well as to a tenfold price increase on the world tantalum market. Mama Doudou abandoned her position as a traditional chief and joined thousands of people who walked into the Ituri forest hoping to get rich quick.

When the price of coltan was soaring, Mama Doudou made an absolute killing. First, she sold bread to miners at a scandalous price. She made as much as $800 worth of coltan for every $50 in cash that she spent on baking supplies. Then she used what she called her ''natural leadership abilities'' to win election as president of the camp prostitutes, most of whom were poorly educated, town-bred women in their late teens. As president, Mama Doudou collected -- and turned over to the owner of the mine -- a variety of fees and fines related to the mating habits of miners and their women.

The normal arrangement in the camp was for a miner, after forking over a kilo of coltan to Mama Doudou, to pair off with one woman for the duration of their respective stays in the forest. The miner's ''temporary wife'' would cook his food, haul his water and share his bed in a shack made of sticks and leaves. In return, he would give her enough coltan to keep her in cosmetics, clothes and beer. If a miner decided that he wanted a prettier young woman to haul his water, he had to pay Mama Doudou another kilo of coltan.

''This is called the infringement fee,'' she explained.

Likewise, if a woman decided, as many did, to dump one miner in favor of another who happened to be a better producer of coltan, then she, too, had to pay Mama Doudou a kilo of coltan.

''This also is called the infringement fee,'' she said.

Frequent swapping of ''temporary wives'' in an equatorial forest where hygiene was problematic and condoms all but nonexistent led to an explosion of gonorrhea.

''There was too much sofisi,'' Mama Doudou said, using the Swahili word for the disease. Soon half the people in Kuwait had it. Antibiotics that could knock down gonorrhea were on sale in the camp for a tomato tin of coltan (worth about $27). They sold exceptionally well.

Mama Doudou's business ventures were part of a squalid encounter between the global high-tech economy and one of the world's most thoroughly ruined countries.